GHIL NEWSLETTER February 2019

Topics

1) Library News

The library will be closed on Thursday 21 and Friday 22 March due to an internal event. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

2) GHIL Seminars

Seminars are held at 5.30 p.m. in the Seminar Room of the German Historical Institute. Guided tours of the Library are available before each seminar at 4.30 p.m.

12 February (5.30pm)Sabine von Heusinger (Cologne) Fire, Siege, and the Jews: Real and Imagined Threats to Water Supply in the Late Medieval City

Focusing on water at times of war, fire, and plague, this talk will look at a premodern society struggling with life-threating dangers but trying to find remedies. Three case studies from the ‘Regnum Teutonicum’ explore war (the siege of Neuss), precautions taken against fire (Strasbourg), and accusations of well-poisoning made against Jews in the late middle ages. They demonstrate that the life-sustaining power of water was crucial for a community. Every threat to water supply — real or imagined — had serious consequences.

The history of cotton has been the subject of much recent research, but blind spots remain. International debates have barely acknowledged the role of early modern Switzerland as one of the most important European areas producing, marketing, and selling cotton cloth in the eighteenth century. This talk shows how Swiss producers and merchants were integrated into global cotton networks and reflects on how cultural history approaches may be reconciled with the debate, dominated by macro-economics, about the Great Divergence.

12 March (5.30pm)Hugo Drochon (Nottingham) and Philipp Felsch (Berlin) Born Posthumously: Two Lectures on Nietzsche’s Legacy

Hugo Drochon will speak first on ‘Nietzsche’s Great Politics: From Bismarck to Hitler’, discussing how Nietzsche’s productive life maps perfectly onto Bismarck’s reign, which was characterized by the ‘great politics’ of German unification and the power politics of the European balance of power. Yet ‘great politics’ was also the way in which Heidegger, Jaspers, and Baeumler of the ‘Hitler prophecy’ tried to make sense of Nietzsche’s politics in the inter-war period, and Drochon’s paper will reflect on how these two moments can help us make sense of our own politics. This will be followed by Philipp Felsch speaking on the ‘The Italian Job: Nietzsche’s Return in the Cold War’ about the return of Nietzsche after the Second World War that was due equally to the new French reception (Deleuze, Klossowski, Foucault, and others) and the critical edition of Nietzsche’s works by the Italian antifascists Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Felsch will dedicate his talk to the latter’s political philology.

19 March (5.30pm)Prashant Kidambi (Leicester) ‘Greengrocer, Tailor and Champion Wrestler’: The Transnational Career and Times of Buttan Singh, c.1900–1914

This paper examines the extraordinary career of Buttan Singh, a Sikh wrestler who became the national wrestling champion of Australia in the early 1900s. Later in that decade, he travelled to Britain and Australia. The paper considers Buttan’s transnational peregrinations within three discrete historical contexts. First, it places his story into the broader streams of Sikh migration within the British Empire. Second, it shows how Buttan’s story became entangled in the making of a frontier society in Western Australia. Finally, the paper relates Buttan’s career to that of other peripatetic sportsmen who breached the ‘colour line’ before the First World War.

3) Public Lecture

GHIL in co-operation with the Modern German History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, University of London

Taking the example of Tube Meetom and Rudolf Duala Manga Bell, two boys from elite families of Duala, Cameroon, living with a petty bourgeois German family, this lecture discusses child circulation practices of the Atlantic contact zone in relation to notions of ‘family’ and home-making. On the level of colonial control the ambivalent practices of state control through the male custodian and the agency of the African father by means of financial and social interaction are highlighted. On the affective level an array of relations between extended families points to bonds not governed by the logic of ‘race’ and coloniality. Although in the end the German colonial authorities forcefully limited the ambitions of the two boys by exiling one and executing the other, their life stories advanced African independence movements in the 1930s.

4) European Leo Baeck Lecture Series

Moses Mendelssohn has engaged artists of Jewish and non-Jewish origin from his lifetime until today. The lecture will show how, over this long period, Mendelssohn has been turned into the icon of German-Jewish modernity by being represented in a myriad of ways and techniques.

In this illustrated lecture, Professor Nathan Abrams will explore recent British representations of Jews on television focussing on the role of the Jewish gangster in McMafia and Peaky Blinders in particular.

17 May Workshop on Medieval Germany Venue: German Historical Institute London Organised by the German Historical Institute London in co-operation with the German Historical Institute Washington and the German History Society. Conveners: Len Scales (Durham University) and Cornelia Linde (GHIL)

6) Kolloquium

The research seminar in German language offers an opportunity for the GHIL’s scholarship-holders to present and discuss their research projects. It can also serve as a general forum for British and German PhD-students and post-docs to discuss their work in progress.

8) Podcast

Quentin Skinner: Hobbes’s Leviathan: Picturing the State (Annual Lecture of the German Historical Institute)

To listen to this lecture please subscribe to the GHIL podcast or download the audio file here.

9) Vacancy

The GHIL is looking to appoint one post-doctoral researcher full time (40 hours per week) for the International Standing Working Group ‘Medialisation and Empowerment of Women', to a fixed-term post for three years, based in London WC1, starting as soon as possible. Closing date for applications: 4 March 2019